THE POD SQUAD

Self-driving vehicles aren't a million miles away but at our doorstep.

- Jim Holder

Autonomous cars were once the hottest topic in the automotive industry, developed at vast expense by everyone from existing manufacturers to ambitious interlopers and set to revolutionise everything from personal mobility to the fundamentals of car design.

Keene: "What would they have made of us?"

And now? Maybe not so much. While the concept is far from abandoned, the vigour with which it is being pursued is dampened. Ford and Volkswagen have dumped their joint venture, Renault describes the technology as a "moonshot" and Tesla is still a long way from putting anything on sale that lives up to its Full Self-Driving nomenclature.

Yet in a corner of Coventry, on the very foundations of the Humber car company (maker of the Hawk, Snipe, Sceptre and more until 1967), is a thriving British firm that apparently didn't get the memo. Starting out as a family-owned business, Aurrigo is now a public company worth tens of millions of pounds - and with the potential, thanks to its pre-eminence in autonomous technology and, ironically, its eyes on more realistic goals, for many multiples of that.

How so? "We weren't ever going to take on the car manufacturers with their scale and budgets, so we've focused on developing technology that can be used today and tomorrow - not in 10 years' time," says sales and marketing director Miles Garner. "That means we can commercialise it now, and build from there."

Here, then, are five examples of Aurrigo's autonomous technology in action.

1 AUTO-SHUTTLE 

"Take a seat and we'll go," says company owner Dave Keene as he ushers me aboard the Aurrigo Auto-Shuttle, a fully electric 10-seat bus that has an interior styled to mimic the inside of Coventry Cathedral in homage to its roots, and that has already been publicly trialled in Alnwick, Birmingham, Cambridge and Taunton.